He grasped the frame now and put his head cautiously out into the night. The slice of Parnassus Road he could see from his window was stone-coloured in the light of the moon. The shadow under the shop awnings was like a solid substance. A streetlight outside the Mini-Mart stuttered and sputtered. Defective tube, he thought. Shire being stingy with the maintenance.

A hot little breeze gusted down out of the grey hills beyond the town, bringing dry medicinal smells in from the paddocks, catching up a sheet of newspaper and spinning it along until it flapped around an awning-post. Somewhere above his head something creaked and scratched against something else. He would have liked to look up, but looking up could be even worse than looking down, especially if you were twisting out of a window.

Instead he looked down at an angle into the window across the alley. Tonight the curtains were pushed back and the room was full of brilliant white light. He could see quite a big piece of lit-up floor. The white sheet was still there, with the shirt spread out on it. As he watched, a man’s legs came over and stood beside it, and a hand reached down with something he recognised after a moment as a light meter. He went on watching, even when the legs and the light meter had gone, but the shirt stared blandly up into the lights and nothing further happened.

He turned back into his room. He tried lying on the bed reading, but the light was so grey the print started to dance in front of his eyes and the way the bed sagged made his back ache. He wished he had brought some light reading. He had finished the piece on Hydration in Portland Cement, but although there was something on Flash Set that looked interesting, he did not feel like it at the moment.

The Engineering Digest was a good read, but you had to be in the mood.

He sat up and pulled his boots on, then crept down the stairs and past the bar, where he could hear a companionable burr of men’s voices and the cricket results being read out from the TV.

A normal man would go in there now, and not be worried by the way all the faces would turn to look at him. A really normal man would not even notice that they were looking.

As he passed the alley, he glanced up and saw that the thing that had creaked and scratched above his head was the D of CALEDONIAN, swinging from its screw.

By night, there was something sinister about Parnassus Road. As soon as you left the circle of light cast by the Caledonian, you were in a world of glimmerings and strange shadowed movements. The butcher’s shop was lit only by a small globe that dimly illuminated the containers of dripping in the window. You would never guess that upstairs, light was blazing. As he turned to cross the road he caught the flicker of his own movement reflected in the stainless steel of the display.

He went along under the awnings, staring into the window of the Mini-Mart where a dim blue bulb lit up screwdrivers, tins of paint, some fly-swats, a row of buckets. Behind them cold white light glowed from the fridges along the back wall, filling the shop with sombre shapes and shadows.

He supposed that, prowling along the footpath, his hair stiffly disarranged by the wind, he could seem as shadowy and sinister as the street.

Where Parnassus Road met Virgil Street the strip of shops ended with the Acropolis Cafe on the corner. Across from the Acropolis was a park with a big elaborate cairn in polished granite, and in front of it a garden bed where, by the grey light of the moon, he could make out the word ANZAC done in marigolds.

A rusting wire circle from a florist’s wreath leaned against the base of the cairn, dried stems still sticking out like barbed wire. Cut into the stone and done with gold leaf that gleamed in the moonlight were the words: To Our Glorious Dead, and under that an alphabetical strip of names: Allnut, P.J., Anderson T.F., Edwards, M.A. At the bottom, like a bureaucrat’s curt stamp: REMEMBERED, with the gilt fallen off the B.

He had never liked the gold-leaf lists, but you could not admit that to anyone.

His own father had been a famous war hero. Was in all the books. His was a name everybody knew. Douglas Cheeseman, VC. The other Douglas Cheeseman. Even now, when people heard his name, they’d look thoughtfully at him. Douglas Cheeseman, they’d say. His mouth would stiffen up, ready for it. Any relation of THE Douglas Cheeseman?

He had never felt his name was his own. It was always as if he had borrowed the name of the famous hero, or stolen it.

He himself — the second Douglas Cheeseman, Douglas Cheeseman the lesser — had been born a month after his father was killed. He knew it by heart: ensuring the safety of his men at the cost of his own life. He knew every detail. On its way home after a successful mission, the Lancaster had caught fire high over France and no one had been able to get the extinguisher to work. There was a business of a jammed pin. The crew got out by parachute while Douglas Cheeseman the first had stayed at the controls, and by the time they were all out, it was too late for him.

Douglas Cheeseman the second admired courage as much as the next man, of course. It was a quality he knew himself conspicuously to lack. He had hung his head, hearing the story of his famous father yet again, guilty in the knowledge that he would not have had that kind of courage.

There was another, more private and unsharable guilt. It was a thought that had to be suppressed every time it tried to surface: that the men in the Lancaster had not needed courage so much as someone with a bit of mechanical expertise. Someone who understood jammed pins.

An engineer, for example.

As a boy he’d had to go to Legacy afternoon teas with the old war comrades. Oh, Douglas Cheeseman, they’d cry, peering at his name tag. You must be the son. They were hearty, glad.

But Douglas Cheeseman the son was not the man his father had been, and had a certain shifty-eyed reluctance to agree about what a legend his father was. After a while their big meaty faces would grow disappointed, and they would turn away.

Alive, his father would have been just another irritable man putting off mowing the lawn, making the bathroom smell of farts, taking wrong turnings on the way to Katoomba.

Dead, he could do no wrong.

Douglas Cheeseman the second knew he was a clumsy jug-eared boy, and had had to accept that he was not only no good at sport, but nothing special at lessons, either. He had always hated the way his face tended to fall into a rather stupid look. He was not stupid, he knew that, but his face sometimes was. He had spent his life avoiding his reflection in shop windows.

He had loved his mother, but she had never been cosy. Nothing gave when you hugged her. Flesh did not yield to flesh. Hers was the engineered perfection of expensive foundation garments. The boys at the school where she taught — not his own school, thank God — had called her, Her Ladyship behind her back, for the erectness of her spine, the arch of her pencilled eyebrows, the perfection of her smart little suits and her sharp narrow shoes.

His mother had always been a mystery to him. She had shed a few tears — appropriate, controlled tears, nothing embarrassing — every Anzac Day at the Cenotaph, and Douglas had stood beside her looking up at the bronze soldiers in puttees staring off above his head, and the same kind of alphabetical list as here. In Memory of Those Who Fell.

When he was little, it had been necessary to explain to him that this was not falling in the sense with which he was all too familiar. As an awkward child, accused in the school report of Poor Gross Motor Skills for his inability to kick or catch balls, he had been prepared to extend his full sympathy to those who fell.

How had his mother really felt, as she went forward to lay the wreath? When she saw the name up there in gilt: Cheeseman, D.J., did she think of how she had laughed with a man made of flesh, at the way their chests had stuck together, in bed on hot afternoons, making rude rubbery noises? How did she feel, running her eye down that alphabetical list, Adams to Yonge, seeing that sticky chest, that laughing mouth, as Cheeseman, D.J.?

He wondered, but he found it hard to imagine his mother’s chest without its foundations, making rude noises.

All his life he had wondered why she had given him the dead hero’s name. She should have known it would be asking a lot of any son. Even if he had been handsome and clever, captain of the cricket team and life of the party, he could still not have lived up to his father, smiling confidently out of his silver frame on the mantelpiece. How much less could he do so, being that hangdog boy, carrying his hidden cargo of guilt?

His senses felt clarified by the dark. It was not a barrier but a fluid medium, bringing him sounds and smells that lapped him around. Swimming through them, Douglas was no longer hunched under the weight of his shortcomings. He felt his shoulders pull back, his spine straighten, his senses come to the alert. He stood on a corner enjoying the way the moon lay on its back and slid in a dignified way behind the curve of a hill.

Since the divorce he had found himself often walking at night. It was not that he was any kind of Peeping Tom. He had no interest in ladies in their underwear. It was more the chance you might learn something. The thing he would have liked to learn was not something you could ask anyone, although it was so simple. How do people get on? He had the feeling that others, somehow, had been born knowing things about how to manage with other people that he himself had been born without. The lives of others, men and women rubbing along together, held a fascination for him. He peered into windows, soaking up other people’s lives as he had once soaked up the logic of the distributed stress-load.

He paused under another window, hearing meat sizzling, smelling cooked lamb. He liked walking at dinner-time. He liked that sense of happy families around the table, tucking in. There was a rattle of cutlery, a low-frequency rumble of voices, swelling music from something on television. A woman called out No two ways about that, love, and laughed.

Further along a window threw a square of yellow light on to the road and lit up a hand-painted sign on a gate that had been altered to read BEWARE OF THE FROGS. Behind the window someone was washing up. There was the deadened clatter of dishes in water, the muffled knocking around of the brush in the suds, then a smash and a cry. First the smash, then the cry. Then immediately a man’s voice, querulous from some far room, on a questioning inflection. Right over his head a woman’s sharp voice, exasperated, shrill, called out, Yes, I dropped a bloody plate!

He wondered. Did that — that querulousness, that sharpness — mean people at the end of their tether with each other? People worn down by years of annoyance, years of the words never connecting, years of the obvious always being spoken, the important things never mentioned: did it mean that? Or was it a man and a woman who knew that cranki ness could be a kind of intimacy?

He moved on. It was bad enough to have bored his wife into leaving, but it would be worse to be discovered lurking in the dunny-lane. I was seeing how other people do it, he might say, but a copper would take a dim view.

On a street of big old houses, like boats moored in their gardens, he paused on the nature strip, beside a bush, glanced in to a lit-up living-room and there she was, the woman of the cows. She was standing leaning over a table looking down at something. As he watched, the dog gave him a fright, coming out like a welcoming host and suddenly licking his hand loudly, not barking, seeming to remember him from the last time they had met.

Her tee-shirt was coming undone along the shoulder. He could see the lips of the seam spreading open along her shoulder so that skin showed.

Marjorie would never have dreamed of wearing a tee-shirt coming undone along the shoulder. But then, Marjorie would never have dreamed of wearing a tee-shirt of any kind. She would have said that it didn’t do anything for her. It had been important to Marjorie that things did something for her.

It was obvious that this woman did not care if things did something for her or not.

He stood there for a long time, watching. When you stood still, you could hear the way the frog noises mounted to a crescendo cr crrr crrrrrrr and then stopped so that you could hear a tick, tick, tick, ticktickticktick, ticktick, tickticktick, and some kind of very high eep eep eeep. Then the frogs started up again. If you were inside a house, you did not hear any of that. But standing outside, holding your breath behind a bush, you heard it all very clearly.

Now she was arranging something on the table in front of her and, as she flicked and lifted, he saw it was pieces of fabric that she was laying out across the table. Then she picked something up and ran it across the surface with a grand gesture like a dancer’s. He watched as she picked up fabric, laid it down, ran the tool across it again. Each time she picked them up, the pieces of fabric were smaller.

Her big plain face was serious, brooding, as she cut and flipped the fabric. She stepped back, cocked her head on one side, rearranged the fabric again.

He wished he could see what it was she was so interested in, laid out on the table.

He quelled the phrases as they rose into his mind again. Very pleased if you would be my guest. She would be embarrassed. You show some bloke how to get through a fence, and suddenly you’re stuck with him: some bloke with big ears and a hungry kind of look in his eyes, being an embarrassment.

She would refuse, but in a tactful way, and that would be embarrassing too.

He had given it a lot of thought, and he had definitely decided not to suggest anything.